I have been interested in anti-Semitism since I was a boy, although I didn’t know that was what it was called. I don’t remember how old I was at the time — I was very young — but I can recall the exact moment when I first became interested in the subject; or should I say, I became drawn to the subject.
My parents and I were watching a program on television. I can even remember the name of the program, Let My People Go (I have recently learned this documentary was produced in 1965, so I would have been 12 or 13 at the time I saw it). It was the kind of documentary you will never see on television today. It was a defense of Zionism (I didn’t know that term either). It was the story of the suffering of the Jewish people. The point they made at the end of the documentary - after I threw up - was that after the Holocaust the Jewish people now had a home of their own in Israel.
I really did throw up. It happened when I saw footage of the Holocaust and death-camps for the first time in my life. It started mildly enough, but my mother realized something was coming that perhaps I should be protected from. I can still remember her asking my dad, “Millard, do you think he should be watching this?” I don’t remember his answer, but he must have thought that it would be alright, because I was allowed to continue to watch it.
But when they began to show footage of the liberation of the camps I began to feel queazy. The only dead body I had ever seen was that of our local druggist, Mr. Bloodhart, at his funeral. I wasn’t prepared for images of bodies being dumped into mass graves, or bulldozers moving piles of corpses at Buchenwald. I remember it vividly because it was at the moment I saw the bulldozers moving the bodies that I vomited, and started crying.
I remember that I was hard to console. My Mom yelled something at my father; I can’t remember what it was. Knowing mom it was probably, “I told you so.” I wanted to know who these people were, and I wanted to know who killed them. But most of all I wanted to know why they were killed. I have wanted to know ever since.
In high school debate I became friends with a number of Jewish boys and girls. I like to say that they taught me how to argue. That’s not completely true, because my mom taught me a great deal, but I learned a new kind of polemics from my Jewish friends. I know that debate is a part of Jewish culture. I don’t know if the style of argument they taught me was just their style of arguing or whether it is a part of Jewish culture generally, but it is still my preferred way of arguing.
I remember wondering how anyone could hate the Jews, but I soon learned my Jewish friends were very aware that some did. I remember that someone thought it would be a great joke to bring a tape of American Nazi leader, George Lincoln Rockwell, to class and play it on our debate coach’s real-to-real recorder. All of us Gentiles pretended we believed it. Our Jewish friends didn’t think it was funny. Even though we bent over backwards apologizing and assuring them we didn’t believe it, one of the better debaters, Howard Minacker, insisted that we allow him to give a rebuttal the next day.
I learned to love these guys and gals, and I became very curious about Judaism. My friends were more than willing to educate me, and I found they were very interested in learning about my kind of Christianity too. They had never heard of Christians who loved the Jews.
After my high school experiences, the Jews were no longer just characters in Bible stories, but real people with faces and a history I wanted to learn more about. Along the way I read a lot about the Jews, Hitler, and the Nazis. In fact, I’ve read so much about Hitler and the Holocaust that I really don’t want to read about it anymore. But I do. I don’t want to forget, and I don’t want the world to forget either.
As I continued to read I eventually came to understand that anti-Semitism pre-dated the Nazis, and that the church’s hands were stained with Jewish blood. Understand, I grew up in a Christian Zionist home before the term was coined. I was taught to love the Jewish people and be thankful for the many things the Jews have given us. For example, I had polio as a child, and my father often mentioned from the pulpit (he was a pastor) that a Jewish man had come up with the polio vaccine. He used this to illustrate the truth of God’s promise to Abraham that all of the world would be blessed through him. He also taught me that the reason America has been blessed like no other nation in this history of the world, is that no nation has ever treated the Jewish people as well as they have been treated in this country (”blessing I will bless”). And he taught me, and I still believe it, that if we ever turned our backs on the Jewish people God would judge America (”cursing I will curse). In retrospect, I think my father’s love of Israel was the reason he let me watch Let My People Go.
So when I learned that there was such a thing as Christian anti-Semitism, I was genuinely surprised. But having read Foxes book of Martyrs, I was initially relieved to find that it was a Catholic problem. Then I learned about Luther. So now I had a new question. I no longer wanted to know why the Nazis hated the Jews; I wanted to know why Christians hated them, and this question has led me to a search for answers. I think I have arrived at part of the answer, and in a series of articles on this blog I will be presenting my case.
Posted in Anti-Semitism, Bible, Theology
